Attentional distribution and word learning in children with autism

This study will investigate how children with autism attend to information when learning new words and how that attention might affect their language development. We know from previous research that children with autism tend to look at social scenes differently than their typically developing peers. Recent research with typically developing children suggests that the way a child looks at social scenes can predict successful language development. To explore the possibility that attention to social scenes among autistic children might be affecting their language development, we will conduct an eye tracking study of visual attention in a word learning task. Children will watch videos of a person labeling new objects while we track their attention to the scene. We will then test the child's recognition of the newly learned words and compare their success to their patterns of attention to the word learning scenes. We will also investigate whether their ability to learn new words in the lab relates to their language development outside of the lab. It is our hope that the information we obtain in this study will lead to the development of new interventions for facilitating language learning in children with autism.